I could hear the other siafu groaning on the balcony above and turned to see if there were any in this apartment with me. Fortunately, I saw that the front door had been barricaded like mine. However, unlike mine, there weren’t any sounds of attackers outside. I was also comforted by the layer of ash on the carpet. It was deep and unbroken, telling me that no one or nothing had walked across this floor for a couple days. For a moment I thought I might be alone, and then I noticed the smell.
I slid the bathroom door open and was blown back by this invisible, putrid cloud. The woman was in her tub. She had slit her wrists, long, vertical slices along the arteries to make sure the job was done right. Her name was Reiko. She was the only neighbor I’d made any effort to know. She was a high-priced hostess at a club for foreign businessmen. I’d always fantasized about what she’d look like naked. Now I knew.
Strangely enough, what bothered me most was that I didn’t know any prayers for the dead. I’d forgotten what my grandparents had tried to teach me as a little kid, rejected it as obsolete data. It was a shame, how out of touch I was with my heritage. All I could do was stand there like an idiot and whisper an awkward apology for taking some of her sheets.
Her sheets?
For more rope. I knew I couldn’t stay there for very long. Besides the health hazard of a dead body, there was no telling when the siafu on that floor would sense my presence and attack the barricade. I had to get out of this building, get out of the city, and hopefully try to find a way to get out of Japan. I didn’t have a fully thought-out plan yet. I just knew I had to keep going, one floor at a time, until I reached the street. I figured stopping at a few of the apartments would give me a chance to gather supplies, and as dangerous as my sheet-rope method was, it couldn’t be any worse than the siafu that would almost certainly be lurking in the building’s hallways and stairwells.
Wouldn’t it be more dangerous once you reached the streets?
No, safer. [Catches my expression.] No, honestly. That was one of the things I’d learned online. The living dead were slow and easy to outrun or even outwalk. Indoors, I might run the risk of being trapped in some narrow choke point, but out in the open, I had infinite options. Better still, I’d learned from online survivor reports that the chaos of a full-blown outbreak could actually work to one’s advantage. With so many other frightened, disorganized humans to distract the siafu, why would they even notice me? As long as I watched my step, kept up a brisk pace, and didn’t have the misfortune to be hit by a fleeing motorist or stray bullet, I figured I had a pretty good chance of navigating my way through the chaos on the streets below. The real problem was getting there.
It took me three days to make it all the way down to the ground floor. This was partially due to my disgraceful physical stamina. A trained athlete would have found my makeshift rope antics a challenge so you can imagine what they were for me. In retrospect it’s a miracle I didn’t plunge to my death or succumb to infection with all the scrapes and scratches I endured. My body was held together with adrenaline and pain medication. I was exhausted, nervous, horribly sleep deprived. I couldn’t rest in the conventional sense. Once it got dark I would move everything I could against the door, then sit in a corner, crying, nursing my wounds, and cursing my frailty until the sky began to lighten. I did manage to close my eyes one night, even drift off to sleep for a few minutes, but then the banging of a siafu against the front door sent me scurrying out the window. I spent the remainder of that night huddled on the balcony of the next apartment. Its sliding glass door was locked and I just didn’t have the strength to kick it in.
My second delay was mental, not physical, specifically my otaku’s obsessive-compulsive drive to find just the right survival gear, no matter how long it took. My online searches had taught me all about the right weapons, clothing, food, and medicine. The problem was finding them in an apartment complex of urban salarymen.
[Laughs.]
I made quite a sight, shimmying down that sheet-rope in a businessman’s raincoat and Reiko’s bright, pink, vintage “Hello Kitty” schoolbag. It had taken a long time, but by the third day I had almost everything I needed, everything except a reliable weapon.
There wasn’t anything?
[Smiles.] This was not America, where there used to be more firearms than people. True fact—an otaku in Kobe hacked this information directly from your National Rifle Association.
I meant a hand tool, a hammer, a crowbar…
What salaryman does his own home maintenance? I thought of a golf club—there were many of those—but I saw what the man across the way had tried to do. I did find an aluminum baseball bat, but it had seen so much action that it was too bent out of shape to be effective. I looked everywhere, believe me, but there was nothing hard or strong or sharp enough I could use to defend myself. I also reasoned that once I made it to the street, I might have better luck—a truncheon from a dead policeman or even a soldier’s firearm.